AWS today announced that it is transitioning OpenSearch, an open source fork of the popular search and analytics engine Elasticsearch, to the Linux Foundation—aptly named the OpenSearch Foundation.
AWS first launched the OpenSearch project in 2021, after Elastic changed the license for its Elasticsearch and Kibana projects to its own proprietary license, the Elastic License. At the time, several open source vendors had adopted similar changes, primarily in an effort to prevent large cloud providers (especially AWS) from offering hosted services based on their software.
Somewhat ironically, this move comes just weeks after Elastic announced that it would be re-releasing Elasticsearch and Kibana under the open source license AGPL, which requires users to publish all source code if they make changes. Interestingly, however, Elastic has decided to make this an option that can be used in conjunction with its own more restrictive license, because, as the company puts it, “some people really like ELv2.”
When AWS created OpenSearch, there was a lot of skepticism about the project, especially because AWS had never managed such a large project before, admits Mukul Karnik, general manager of AWS’s search service.
“When we started OpenSearch, it was a new thing for Amazon and AWS to take an open source project and grow it,” he told me in an interview ahead of today’s announcement. “Our goal from the beginning was to be community-driven and find ways for more community members to participate and contribute to the project.”
Karnik noted that AWS has gradually opened up the project to encourage contributions and broader governance. “In some ways, it’s become more organic because we’re taking these organic steps to figure out how to get more people involved in the project.”
With today’s launch, several large enterprises, including SAP and Uber, have joined the Foundation as Premier Members, and Aiven, Aryn, Atlassian, Canonical, Digital Ocean, Eliatra, Graylog, NetApp Instaclustr, and Portal26 have joined as General Members.
Karnik said he expects AWS to expand its contributions to OpenSearch.
While there isn’t a foundation on the roadmap for 2021, Karnik said bringing the project under its own foundation feels like a natural next step. He also noted that the OpenSearch ecosystem has added quite a bit of its own innovation to the project, including moving from a cluster-based system to a cloud-native architecture. He also noted that the project has recently introduced updates such as compute and storage separation and segment replication. With the advent of AI, interest in OpenSearch as a vector database has also grown, Karnik said.
The new foundation will follow the existing Linux Foundation governance model, with a Board of Directors and a Technical Steering Committee.
“The Linux Foundation is excited to provide a neutral home for open, collaborative development centered on open source search and analytics,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. “Search is something we all rely on every day for business and consumer purposes, and we look forward to supporting the OpenSearch community and helping to bring powerful search and analytics tools to organizations and individuals around the world.”
Like many similar foundations, one of the reasons AWS decided to contribute to this project now is to gain access to the Linux Foundation’s services and expertise in managing and growing open source projects. This move also helps to break away from the perception that OpenSearch is primarily an AWS-led project, which is an important step toward continued growth and wider adoption.
